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For a long time, the image of the chef has been remarkably consistent: a man in a white jacket, barking orders in a hot kitchen and demanding perfection from everyone around him.

At the Chef’s Table Festival in Park City, Utah, last month, the women chefs I encountered offered a much more expansive definition of what it means to cook — and what it means to lead a kitchen.

They weren’t presenting a single vision for the future of food. They were doing something more interesting: building careers around their own identities, experiences and ideas rather than trying to force themselves into the traditional mold of what a chef is supposed to look like.

During a panel titled “Women Shaping the Future of Food,” chefs Fariyal Abdullahi, Sarah Glover and Betül Tunç talked about everything from social media and motherhood to femininity, cultural identity and the pressures of building a career in an industry that has not always made much room for women.

For Abdullahi, visibility is part of that work.

She told the audience that after posting a simple video of herself breaking down a fish, the clip unexpectedly took off on Instagram. What surprised her wasn’t only the number of people watching, but what some of those viewers saw in her.

“I don’t realize how many eyes are on me until someone is driving from D.C. to eat my food and saying, ‘I want my daughter to be like you,’” she said. “Inspiring little girls and being visible is so important to me.”

Abdullahi, who grew up in Ethiopia, has always understood food as inseparable from community. She was raised in a huge extended family — she has 32 aunts and uncles — and remembers a house that was almost constantly full.

“Our house was always packed, I was never bored,” she said. “One of the things that captivated me about food was that it brings people together.”

That sense of togetherness followed her into professional cooking, but so did the more complicated expectations surrounding women and food.

Abdullahi spoke about growing up Muslim and the tradition of women showing respect for their husbands and male family members by cooking for them and serving them first. At the same time, she draws inspiration from the women in Ethiopian history who fought for the country’s independence, including an empress who went into battle against the Italian army.

She doesn’t see those identities as contradictory.

“I have both of those things in me,” she said.

That ability to hold seemingly opposing ideas at once became one of the most compelling threads running through the festival.

For Australian chef Sarah Glover, it has meant embracing femininity while building a career around one of cooking’s most visually aggressive elements: fire.

Glover talked about being inspired by Nigella Lawson, one of the early food-media personalities to make femininity itself a visible part of her public identity.

“Nigella was so beautiful and sexy and really showing people how to be this domestic goddess,” Glover said.

She also recalled a conversation with open-fire chef Francis Mallmann, who described fire as feminine. Glover connected that idea to Aboriginal traditions in which women historically cared for the fire while men hunted. There is something almost deliberately subversive about that framing. Fire is usually coded as aggression, danger and toughness. Glover sees something else in it: warmth, caretaking and even a kind of dance.

“People think fire is aggressive because it burns and it can hurt you,” she said. “But the smell and warmth is very nurturing and comforting.”

Glover said she enjoys embracing her femininity and “taking that back” while working over fire. Her floral, flowing clothes and romantic aesthetic are not things she feels compelled to shed in order to be taken seriously as a chef. They are part of the point of view she brings to her work.

That idea — that a chef’s point of view comes from the entirety of a life, rather than one neatly defined culinary tradition — surfaced again during a panel about travel and where chefs eat.

Chef Isabel Coss spoke about deliberately seeking out experiences that leave her feeling a little out of place. Travel, she said, requires trusting yourself and trusting the journey.

“Playlists, music, attention to detail, you bring all of that back,” she said. “We’re a compound of our travels, lives, and experiences.”

It is a useful way to think about culinary identity. Food does not always have to fit neatly into categories like Mexican, Jordanian, Ethiopian or Australian. It can be the accumulation of everywhere a person has been and everything they have experienced.

Jordanian chef Sara Aqel made a similar argument from another direction.

“We get really sucked into the idea of looking up to someone and wanting to be just like them, and that’s not right,” she said. “You start losing bits of yourself and what could make you a better chef and make your food better food.”

Aqel said she is fascinated by ingredients and techniques from around the world, particularly Japan. But when she cooks, she returns to what she knows most intimately.

Her food is rooted in Jordan, she explained, even as she incorporates techniques learned from chefs in Italy, Peru and Ecuador.

“Every chef I meet, I learn new techniques I can use,” she said. “But when you cook, you always want to cook from somewhere you understand.”

That sense of authorship was visible throughout the festival. Each chef seemed to have a recognizable point of view — something you could understand from the plate itself, without needing the chef to stand beside the table explaining it.

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For women working in food, though, that question of authorship extends beyond aesthetics. It can also mean rethinking the culture of the kitchen itself.

Earlier in the festival, chef Jessica Rosval made that argument during a panel about creativity. Creativity, she said, is never free. Chefs have to consider seasonality, cost, time and, crucially, the people who will actually have to execute the food.

“You have to be conscious of your team and employees in the process,” she said. “It’s your responsibility as a chef to provide good quality of work life.”

Rosval pushed directly against the stereotype of the angry, aggressive chef who treats the kitchen like a battlefield. A menu, she argued, should not require cooks to spend 18 hours peeling pine nuts simply because the chef wants to demonstrate technical skill.

“You have to learn how to take the big ideas and stories and compress that into a bite,” she said.

Her philosophy was simpler still: “Work does not have to feel like war.”

That may be one of the most significant shifts these chefs are arguing for. The goal is not simply to get more women into professional kitchens. It is to make enough room for women to decide what those kitchens — and the careers built inside them — should look like once they arrive.

That also means confronting one of the industry’s most persistent assumptions: that a successful chef must sacrifice everything else to the job.

Abdullahi and Glover both spoke about the fear many women in the industry face that becoming a mother could mean giving up their careers. Professional kitchens demand long hours and enormous physical and emotional energy, and the industry has historically been structured around the expectation that someone else is handling the rest of your life.

Abdullahi argued that the solution is not asking women to choose differently. It is building an industry spacious enough to hold both.

“We need to make space for women in the kitchen to have careers and also be mothers,” she said.

The chefs at the festival weren’t offering a single blueprint for how to accomplish that.

Their work suggested precisely the opposite: there can be many versions.

There is Glover, embracing a feminine aesthetic while cooking over open flames. Aqel, grounding her food in Jordan while absorbing techniques from around the world. Coss, treating travel as an essential ingredient in her creative life. Abdullahi, drawing simultaneously from Ethiopian history, Muslim traditions and her own contemporary experience. Rosval, trying to build kitchens in which creativity and humane working conditions reinforce, rather than contradict, one another.

And then there is Bolivian chef Marsia Taha, who used the festival to introduce diners to an ingredient they might otherwise approach with some hesitation.

She served piranha.

The fish arrived at the table whole, head on, its sharp teeth still plainly visible. We ate it with our hands.

And it was delicious.

That meal felt like a small, vivid demonstration of what the women at the festival had been describing all weekend.

Food can preserve tradition without becoming trapped by it. It can be feminine without being delicate. It can be ambitious without being punishing. A chef can travel the world without losing sight of where she came from. She can become a mother without surrendering her career. A kitchen can demand excellence without demanding suffering.

At the Chef’s Table Festival, the women chefs seemed less interested in proving that they could succeed within the old model than in asking what might happen if they built something different.

The future of food does not require one new model of the chef.

It requires making room for many more of them.

The post The women reshaping kitchen culture appeared first on Salon.com.

Over the years, there have been several attempts to give legendary country singer, philanthropist and all-around icon Dolly Parton a commemorative day of her own.

In 2019, then-Nashville Mayor David Briley named August 5 Dolly Parton Day in recognition of both her musical career and the enormous impact of her nonprofit, Imagination Library. Then, in January of this year, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee proclaimed Jan. 19 Dolly Parton Day in honor of her 80th birthday.

It is difficult, of course, to contain someone as singular — and seemingly as genuine — as Parton within a single calendar square. “Down to earth” is an overused phrase, but rarely has it fit someone so famous quite so well. After the singer’s death in August, however, cities and states across the country joined together in recognizing Sept. 25 as Dolly Parton Day. This one feels like it might stick.

The date itself is a wink to one of Parton’s most famous songs: “9 to 5.” There’s the phonetic joke — nine-two-five — but also something fitting in the song’s message of good humor and perseverance when the man, quite literally, seems determined to keep you down. That keep-your-chin-up spirit was central to Parton’s public persona and remains one small piece of the enormous legacy she leaves behind.

Parades, concerts, festivals and other celebrations will take place around the country. If you’re looking to extend the festivities at home, I can’t think of a better tribute than a true Southern feast — perhaps paired with a donation to Imagination Library.

Parton, who said she first learned to cook out of necessity for her many siblings, was a devoted champion of hearty Southern home cooking. She released several cookbooks filled with classics like chicken and dumplings alongside what she called “old mountain stuff”: beans, potatoes and the inexpensive staples of her East Tennessee childhood. She also launched a baking mix line with Duncan Hines and, later, a series of frozen meals and sides.

So, if you’re building a Dolly-worthy table, here’s where to start.

Cinnamon bread

First things first: You can’t throw a Dolly Parton party without a little Dollywood.

The theme park’s famous cinnamon bread may be the closest thing to a Dolly-approved breakfast pastry, and it is every bit as indulgent as you’d expect from something served in a place full of roller coasters, rhinestones and a giant pink butterfly. The pull-apart loaf is warm, soft and buttery, streaked generously with cinnamon sugar that caramelizes around the edges as it bakes.

Technically, it’s breakfast. Realistically, I have been known to sneak a piece at lunch, in the late afternoon or after dinner with a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream. Dolly Day seems like an especially good excuse.

Coleslaw

Dolly’s “Slaw of Many Colors” is exactly the kind of Southern side dish you want on a table crowded with richer fare: crunchy, creamy, colorful and just a little more playful than your average bowl of coleslaw.

The recipe appears in “Good Lookin’ Cookin’,” the 2024 cookbook Parton wrote with her sister, Rachel Parton George, which features more than 80 recipes alongside family stories. Organized around holidays and gatherings, the book feels particularly appropriate for an occasion like this one.

Coleslaw is already a Southern cookout staple, but this version has a little extra personality. Its cool crunch and acidity offer some welcome relief beside chicken and dumplings, beans and potatoes and whatever other comfort food inevitably accumulates at a Dolly Parton potluck.

Think of it as a palate cleanser — provided your idea of a palate cleanser involves a generous amount of mayonnaise.

Macaroni salad

Parton’s macaroni salad appeared in her first cookbook, “Dollywood Presents: Tennessee Mountain Home Cooking” (1989), a community cookbook featuring more than 250 traditional Southern and Appalachian recipes collected from members of the “Dollywood Family” and sold at the Pigeon Forge theme park.

Macaroni salad was one of my favorite sides as a kid, though I’m not entirely sure why. My mom never made it at home, yet the dish still brings back immediate memories of summer cookouts at the local park: hamburgers on the grill, bubbles floating through the air, chalk neighborhoods drawn across the sidewalk.

There is simply something about a cold, creamy bowl of pasta salad that feels destined for a red-checkered tablecloth and a paper plate.

Dolly’s version fits neatly into that world. It is cool, creamy and loaded with crunchy vegetables, with enough tang and sweetness to keep you going back for “just one more bite.” Better still, it’s ideal party food: Make it ahead, pile it into the biggest bowl you own and let everybody serve themselves.

Parton loved feeding people. This is exactly the sort of dish built for it.

Chicken and dumplings

If one dish belongs at the center of a Dolly Parton feast, it’s chicken and dumplings.

Dolly herself called it the recipe she was most famous for, and she frequently connected the dish to what she learned from her mother, Avie Lee. Her version appeared in “Dolly’s Dixie Fixin’s” in 2006 and resurfaced in “Good Lookin’ Cookin’” in 2024 as one of the sisters’ family favorites.

This is not sleek, minimalist chicken. It is unapologetic Southern comfort: tender meat and soft dumplings tucked into rich broth, the whole thing landing somewhere between supper and a blanket.

That heartiness makes even more sense when you remember Parton was one of 12 siblings and learned to cook in part by helping her mother feed the family.

In a characteristically Dolly explanation of what makes the dish special, she has said her chicken and dumplings have “love” in them.

We’ll take that as the final ingredient.

Beans and potatoes

Beans and potatoes may not sound especially glamorous for a celebration of one of country music’s most glamorous women. That is precisely why they belong here.

Parton grew up in the mountains of East Tennessee in a family where cooking was less about spectacle than figuring out how to make something good from what you had. She has described those early meals — beans, potatoes and other inexpensive staples — as foundational to the way she learned to cook.

At Dollywood, pinto beans and potatoes connect the theme park’s enormous spectacle back to the Appalachian upbringing that shaped its namesake. Parton also famously loved potatoes, once joking that the starchy vegetable was the reason she could never stick to a diet.

Together, the beans are savory and substantial, the potatoes soft and comforting: exactly the kind of unfussy side dish that makes sense alongside the richer Southern classics on this table.

More than that, they are a reminder that Parton never appeared especially interested in sanding away the humble roots of her childhood. She carried them with her — all the way into an enormous career built, in part, on the warmth and generosity she first learned at home.

Cuppa cuppa cake

Now for dessert — and a little Hollywood history.

Cuppa cuppa cake became famous thanks to Parton’s role as Truvy Jones in the 1989 film “Steel Magnolias.” In one of the movie’s most memorable food moments, Truvy explains the almost comically straightforward formula: a cup of flour, a cup of sugar and a cup of fruit cocktail.

That’s it.

No elaborate pastry technique. No agonizing over whether your peaks are stiff or merely firm. This is pure dump-and-mix baking, producing a simple, sweet fruit cake with a golden, bubbly top and soft, spoonable center.

It lands somewhere between cake and cobbler and is especially good served warm under a generous scoop of ice cream — which feels appropriately unfussy for Truvy and appropriately celebratory for Dolly.

Banana pudding

Finally, I can’t think of a better way to close a Dolly Parton celebration than banana pudding.

The recipe was one of Parton’s contributions to “Cooking with Country Music Stars,” a 1986 cookbook compiled by the Country Music Foundation featuring recipes from some of the genre’s biggest names, including Reba McEntire, George Strait and Conway Twitty. Parton has described banana pudding as one of her favorite desserts, tying it to both her childhood and her mother’s cooking. Versions continued to appear in her later cookbooks, keeping the dessert firmly rooted in the food story she told throughout her life.

Parton’s is the old-fashioned kind: layers of vanilla wafers and sliced bananas nestled into creamy pudding, finished with a cap of fluffy meringue lightly browned in the oven. The bananas add freshness; the wafers soften just enough in the pudding to become almost cake-like.

It is, above all, a dish meant to be shared — friends and family gathered around a kitchen table, everybody reaching for another spoonful while quietly keeping track of who got the last good piece.

If there’s one thing Parton seemed to understand especially well, it’s that food is rarely only about food. It is family, memory, generosity and the simple pleasure of making someone feel welcome at your table.

And it doesn’t always have to be pretty. What matters more is that it tastes good and that you share it with people you love.

So put on a Dolly playlist, pile the plates high and pass the banana pudding.

The post How to celebrate Dolly Parton Day with a Southern feast appeared first on Salon.com.

Not everyone thinks of citrus fruits as “winter fruits.” But that’s when oranges, grapefruits, tangerines, tangy lemons, and enticing limes are often at their peak. And that’s a good thing because there’s nothing that brightens up any season – but especially winter – better than a classic French lemon tart.

Any bakery in Paris will have a Tarte au citron on offer. Some are on the sweet side, others tart. I like my lemon tart, well…tart, for sure and when I search for lemons at my market, I choose the plumpest, juiciest ones I can find. Fortunately, good lemons are available just about anywhere, so anyone can make this tart. Most of us don’t even have to wait until winter!

I juiced my lemons, cracked some eggs, and got to work on the tart.

For the base, I used Paule’s pastry dough, which is so easy to make and hasn’t failed me yet. It’s delicious and buttery, and goes particularly well with the delicious lemon topping.

I cooked the filling, a sunny, luscious lemon curd, on the stovetop with the fragrant zest of the lemons, then poured the warm filling through a strainer to make it as smooth as possible.

 One could pipe whipped cream on it or top it with meringue. To do so, let it cool and spread or pipe whipped cream over the top or serve a dollop alongside. If you want to give a go at meringue, check out my Lime Meringue Tart recipe or the marshmallow topping that I use on my Pumpkin Pie with Marshmallow Topping.

Both are delicious, but just as it is – or as the French say, nature – is just fine with me.

Print

Lemon Tart

I recently updated this recipe to increase the amount of filling and I dialed down the sugar a bit due to frequent questions about reducing sugar in recipes. You can taste the filling in step 3 and if you'd like it sweeter, add up to 1/4 cup (50g) more sugar If you find that you have a bit too much filling for your tart shell (they seem to vary), any remaining lemon filling that you don’t use can be spread on toast, fresh biscuits, or scones. You could substitute fresh lime juice for the lemon, and if you have Meyer lemons, reduce the sugar to 1/2 cup (100g). You can use a favorite tart dough recipe, or the one I’ve linked to.

Ingredients

• 1 cup (250ml) freshly-squeezed lemon juice
• grated zest of two lemons preferably unsprayed
• 3/4 cup (150g) sugar
• 12 tablespoons (170g) butter salted or unsalted, cut into cubes
• 4 large eggs
• 4 large egg yolks
• One pre-baked 9-inch (23cm) tart shell

Instructions

• Preheat the oven to 350ºF (180ºC).
• In a medium-sized non-reactive saucepan, heat the lemon juice, zest, sugar, butter, eggs and egg yolks. Have a mesh strainer nearby.
• Stir until the butter is melted, then whisk the mixture continuously until the mixture thickens and holds its shape when you lift some of it up with the whisk and it visibly mounds up when dropped back down over the rest of the mixture in the saucepan. It should just take a few minute.
• Pour the warm lemon curd though a strainer into a bowl (or directly into the tart shell), scraping with a rubber spatula to press it through.
• Smooth the lemon filling in the prebaked tart shell and pop it in the oven until the curd is just set. It’ll take about 5 to 6 minutes.
• Remove from the oven and let cool before slicing and serving.

Related Links

Recipes to Use Up Leftover Egg Whites

Lemon Verbena Ice Cream

Moroccan Preserved Lemons

Tips for Freezing Eggs

What is non-reactive cookware?

I love my kitchen, I really do. But lately, I’ve been searching for every excuse under the sun to get outside. Whether it’s taking a long walk home from work, bringing my weekend reading to the park, or slipping outside for lunch, I’m making the most of our very warm, sunny weather. But some days are just too hot to think, too hot to move, and certainly too hot to cook. For those sticky, sweaty, sweltering days, make one of these no-cook summer dishes. That means that you don’t have to turn on the stove or oven to enjoy a seasonally inspired meal for lunch or dinner. I want dishes I can toss together sans stove or oven, like crispy salads, cool soups, and crunchy sandwiches. And, thankfully, summer’s bounty is ready to provide. After dinner, cool off with a frozen treat like our no-churn ice creams or dairy-free sorbets. We're in the dog days of summer, when all you want to do is sit by the A/C with a pint of ice cream. Here, I’ve gathered 30 of our freshest no-cook dishes. Now, go outside and enjoy the day!

What to Bake When It’s Too Hot for the Oven

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Let me get one thing straight: I have loved boxed macaroni and cheese for as long as I can remember. From the bright orange Kraft mac and cheese dinners my dad "cooked" when my mom was out of town, to the countless microwaveable single-serve Easy Mac cups I consumed in college, and fancied-up shells and white cheddar from Annie's that now fill my pantry, this gloriously convenient invention has always been a part of my life.

And while you can often catch me whipping up a batch of the stuff in its purest form (including last night, when I had zero desire to prepare a full dinner), there are times when I like to experiment with different combinations of ingredients. Some are based off my cravings (spicy, bright and herby, or totally carbo-loaded), and other times they're based off whatever leftovers are in my fridge. Sure, adding extra ingredients can take away a bit of the simplicity, but incorporating them is easy and rarely takes more than a few minutes—in fact, you can usually finish the prep while the pasta water boils. Most importantly, they pay off big time in terms of flavor.

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